Actionable Guide: Maslow’s Hierarchy of SEO Needs

• Google Analytics
  Google Analytics will show you all kinds of metrics around how your users are interacting with the website. The best way to measure compelling content is to look at the average engagement time for those important pages.

  In GA4 (the only version available as of July 2023), you’ll find that under Reports > Engagement > Overview.

What this metric tells us is the average amount of time users have had your site open and are actually looking at it. It excludes any time it was open in a background tab.

• Social media shares
  If a piece of content truly resonates with your audience and you have enough brand exposure, you’ll get social shares.
  Tools like Ahrefs Top Content report and SharedCount are great ways to see if your content has been getting those shares.

   

Although volume is important, you should also be keeping an eye on the sentiment of those posts — particularly on sites like Reddit where the veil of anonymity tends to give the most critical (albeit exaggerated) viewpoints.

Keyword optimized

In modern SEO, keyword optimization is more nuanced than it used to be. Back in the day, it was about forcing your keywords to appear as many times on a page as possible. Now though, it’s mostly about topical relevance — is your website and its content actually relevant to the search term? More specifically, does it do a better job of serving searching intent than your competitors?

Foot Locker is a great example of this. They appear on page 1 for the search term “shoe store nyc” even though the word “shoe” is found just once on the page. One of the main reasons they still rank so well is because they serve that intent well — if you’re looking for a shoe store, Foot Locker is one of the options. How many times they mention the word ‘shoes’ on the page is mostly irrelevant.

Keywords just aren’t as important as they once were. They still matter, but things like keyword density just aren’t a thing.

With that said, there are a few best practices you should be following at this relatively early tier of optimization. Where practical, you want your primary keyword(s) to appear in these locations for a given landing page:

• Page titles (aka title tags)
• Meta descriptions (not a ranking factor but it helps get more clicks)
• Main heading (H1)
• Content, as much as practical

The difference between you and the Footlocker example is that you aren’t Footlocker. You aren’t a large, well-established brand in your niche with thousands of signals that you’re relevant to the searcher’s intent.

Note: Forcing your keyword(s) into each of these elements is a dated way to look at optimization. If it feels natural when you’re using your keywords, great. If you need to jam that keyword in at the cost of readability or user experience, don’t do it.

Great user experience

Since you have HotJar set up and you’re familiar with your Google Analytics engagement metrics, you have a fair idea of your user experience. Now, it’s time to start improving on it.

Instead of looking at what you want them to do (conversions), start by looking at your audience’s intent and work your way back from there. 

• What is it they’re trying to do, find or understand on your website? 
• Are you making it as simple as possible to find that info or perform that action?
• When they find it, is your version of that page easier and more helpful than your competitors?

Once you can genuinely answer yes to all three of these, then you can start looking toward that next tier.

Share-worthy content

The more engaging and helpful your content, the more likely it is that your audience will share it. The more social shares and website backlinks you get, the more relevant your brand becomes in your niche.

Tools like Ahrefs allow you to see your competitors’ top pages by backlinks and social media shares so you can see what’s been working for them. From that point, it’s time to get creative.

The question you need to find an answer to is “why would someone share a link to our site?” One great place to start looking here is at tools your audience will love to have access to online. A great example of this is Mangool’s SERP Simulator tool that allows users to see what their page titles and meta descriptions will look like in a search result.

While it’s not flashy, it does make an SEO’s life so much easier when writing a set of new page titles.

Title, URL and description

Once you reach this tier, your website is already performing well and you’re looking for those marginal improvements that squeeze that bit more ROI. This is where those minor 1% changes come into play — elements like page titles, meta descriptions and your URL structure.

While some of these may have a very minor impact on your rankings, they’re mostly about increasing the likelihood of people clicking on your website over the competition.

In the search results, your page title and meta description are the first two opportunities to sell a user on why they should click your link over the other ~9 on the page. The URL structure helps add validity to that link, confirming that what they’re about to see is relevant to their intent. Let’s look at some examples.

Primary Keyword: Best Productivity Tools

Poor example

Improved example

Schema markup (aka structured data) and snippets

When a link to your website is shown on search engines, social media platforms and other apps, it’s usually presented as a snippet or ‘card’. Like the example from Slack below, it’ll usually include a title, description and an image from that page.

Schema markup allows us to identify these elements for other platforms to use reliably. For example, ‘this line is my title’, ‘this is the description block’, and ‘use this image in the snippet’.

Although these platforms are getting better at understanding which will be most effective in a given context, it’s still a good idea to set them manually to make sure.

As we’ll see below, proper schema markup also has the potential to make your website show up better in the search results as well. This helps you get more clicks from the right audience which we can all agree is a major win.

Rich snippets in the search results

Since 2009, Google has been using various forms of rich snippets (or ‘rich results’) to improve the way they satisfy searcher intent. This can be in the form of recipes like the example below, reviews, movie times, pricing and more.

Each highlighted section of this screenshot is an element Google has pulled from the which can be influenced by schema.

By implementing the right type of schema, you can improve your click-through rate significantly, visually standing out on the page more and demonstrating that you have the info they need.

For example, a user is far more likely to click the recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction (SBA) over the one from Once Upon a Chef. Even though the latter is a more recent recipe, the fact that it’s comparatively bland-feeling, almost incomplete by comparison. More importantly, SBA’s recipe shows that 106 people have really enjoyed that recipe, while the other is purely a gamble.

In this example, Google also shows snippets of actual recipes, starting with the ingredients. These recipes give users the opportunity to save it to their ‘cookbook’ collection direct from the SERP, making it easier to find later.

All of this, and more, can be controlled by implementing correct schema markup. Without schema markup, you may still show up with some of these features but you’re leaving it up to chance.

Sharing on social media and other digital platforms

Much like the Slack example above, other digital platforms like Twitter (below), Facebook and Asana will also show a snippet of the link you’ve shared. Although the implementation can vary slightly for these, controlling which images and descriptions are used is still done through forms of schema markup.

Much like the rich snippets in the search results, the way these ‘cards’ show up can be the factor that earns you that qualified click.

How to apply schema markup

Depending on what platform your site is built on, there are two options for implementing schema markup. If you’re on WordPress, plugins like Yoast SEO will help you to apply this automatically. For a more detailed approach there are countless other plugin options available too.

If you’re not using WordPress, a more manual approach is needed, typically handled by a developer. It involves identifying the right type of schema for a given page/element, taking that code snippet, modifying it and adding to the page correctly.

As an example, here’s an example snippet taken from Google’s guide on Search Central. This highlights the opening hours for a local business and gets placed in the <head> section of your page’s HTML:

"openingHoursSpecification": [
  {
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": [
      "Monday",
      "Tuesday",
      "Wednesday",
      "Thursday",
      "Friday"
    ],
    "opens": "09:00",
    "closes": "21:00"
  },
  {
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": [
      "Saturday",
      "Sunday"
    ],
    "opens": "10:00",
    "closes": "23:00"
  }
]

Although it doesn’t require detailed JSON knowledge, it is time-consuming for the uninitiated. For a more detailed breakdown of current schema implementation, take a look at this guide from Schema App.

–

SEO is a complex challenge with a lot of moving parts and this hierarchy helps to give some order to the chaos.

Now that you have this deeper understanding of Maslow’s hierarchy, it’s time to start putting these linear steps into action. 

No matter how great you think your website is, start at the bottom and work your way up. You will find actionable things that were overlooked somewhere in that structure, guaranteed.